Cheatham Lake
A 67.5-mile Cumberland River reservoir that runs from downtown Nashville down to Ashland City — and, unlike almost every other lake on this site's Tennessee list, barely moves. Corps-managed, run-of-river, and the closest thing in Middle Tennessee to a lake that looks the same in January as it does on the Fourth of July.
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Submit a Photo →The Lake at a Glance
Cheatham Lake is the Cumberland River, dammed. The Nashville District of the US Army Corps of Engineers completed Cheatham Lock and Dam in 1951–52 about ten miles northwest of Ashland City, and the reservoir that resulted stretches 67.5 miles back upstream — all the way to Old Hickory Dam. That single fact explains almost everything else about the lake: the upper reaches of Cheatham Lake are the same water that flows through downtown Nashville, and the lake itself only really becomes “the lake” as it widens past the city and into Cheatham and Dickson counties on its way to the dam.
At 7,450 acres, Cheatham is a mid-size Middle Tennessee reservoir — smaller than Old Hickory or Percy Priest, but with a genuinely different character than either. It is a run-of-river project, which in Corps terminology means it has no dedicated flood storage capacity: water moves through more or less continuously, the same way it does at Old Hickory and Cordell Hull, rather than being held back and released the way it is at a true flood-control reservoir like Center Hill or J. Percy Priest. Three marinas serve the lake — Rock Harbor Marina, the Commodore Yacht Club, and the 142-slip Harpeth Shoals Marina near the Braxton Condominiums — alongside sixteen free public boat access points maintained by the Corps.
What Buyers Need to Know First
Every other lake on this site's Tennessee list has a drawdown story. Norris drops 25 feet. Douglas and Watauga drop up to 44. Dale Hollow drops 60. Cheatham Lake's full pool elevation is 385 feet above mean sea level; its winter pool elevation is 384 feet. That is a one-foot swing. For a lakefront buyer, this is not a minor footnote — it is arguably the single most important fact about the property. A dock on Cheatham Lake sits in roughly the same amount of water in January as it did in July. There is no autumn drawdown to plan around, no exposed mudflat to budget a longer gangway for, no need to time a closing around what the shoreline will look like six months later. Buyers moving from a dramatic-drawdown lake elsewhere in Tennessee consistently describe this as the biggest lifestyle difference they notice.
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